The guy knocked on my door at *0830* AM. Fortunately I was up, but
just barely. No coffee yet. I stumbled outside...




First thing was to bring the fiber into the basement.  It had been run
from the pole a few days earlier.  The Verizon folks had no problem with my
wish to mount the Optical Network Terminal [ONT] inside instead of outside
where it usually goes.  I spotted about where I thought the hole should go,
and he went at it with the skinny, long bit.  Once through, he left the whole
mess hanging there as an inside locator.



But the already-terminated fiber connector needed to fit through a much
larger hole, so next came the 1-inch spade.  Through one layer of siding
and clapboard ...



whereupon it just kissed the top of the sill piece, making it hard to keep
the bit straight.  So he finished this half of the hole angling upward,
and then went through from inside the basement to meet it.  [Let it be
stated for the record that communications installers are NOT carpenters.]



Some insulation and cruft was in the way, and soon we were on either side
of the wall trying to see each others' light ... and then suddenly the
fiber connector popped in at me!  I pulled the rest through.



The run got tacked neatly to the joists, roughly following the path of
the existing phone lines but farther over to the side of the stairwell.



The excess fiber usually gets coiled up in the backing box for the ONT.
Interestingly, this piece is just long enough to get from here, up the
house and across the street to the wire swag, and then along that a little
way to the optical splitter near the pole.  They don't terminate any of
this stuff in the field, they just carry a whole lot of pre-built lengths.



Close-up of the connector, called an OptiTap.  It's only one fiber
strand, I think, which carries light both ways.



Other components: a DC/DC converter power supply that also houses a battery
backup, and the smaller box is a 48VDC supply that feeds the whole mess.
The ONT can also supply four POTS lines, including loop current and DTMF
parsing and D/A conversion right there in the box -- everything except
96 VAC *ringing* works off the battery backup, so if power goes out you
can call out on a POTS line but not receive calls.  Weird, given that small
step-up converters are a dime a dozen these days and a 12V battery could be
easily made to generate ringing voltage.

Oh, and that's Shayde's old UPS underneath, which feeds the 48V supply
and provides even *more* backup.



There was plenty of room to mount all this stuff in the stairwell.



Finally power was applied, and the unit went through a lamp-test and then
sat there blinking the "fail" light.  But the "network" light was solidly
on, indicating a nice healthy signal off the fiber [actually, he measured
it with a dB meter before plugging in].  To actually provision the unit,
he went out to the *truck* to mess with a wireless-interfaced laptop and
tell the upstream management gear to configure the ONT.

The unit is a Tellabs AccessMAX ONT 611, and from the sketchy documentation
I can find is some sort of ATM bridge.  It can carry data, voice, and
video [the thing near the right end of the steel box is an F connector],
at something like 622 Mbits down and 155 Mbits upstream -- in this case,
administratively limited to 15 and 2.  Verizon is planning to offer some
sort of cable-TV like service over these things.  This general strategy
is called "triple play" in the market -- voice, data, and video over a
single pipe to the home, all fed by a WDM fiber plant.



So naturally *my* laptop was ready to go, and I plugged in.  I figured that
IF the upstream routing had already been dealt with, I should start seeing
traffic since this is a static-IP install.  The unit looks like a host and
not a hub, so a flip cable is needed.  This particular one is from some
Interop in the early nineties, in fact...



And lo and behold, something was already trying to find my IP addresses.
ARP storms like this are a result of the ceaseless automated scans that
mostly originate from trojaned machines the world over.  Until something
actually answers, all the upstream router can do is attempt to find the
target MAC addresses.  As soon as I became one of the addresses, I had
connectivity -- nothing more needed, and no stupid PPPoE or DHCP dances.



I was also curious about the path and distance between the existing pipe and
the new one, and who else might be on the fiber side.  Someone's mailserver
nearby was about all I could find.  It was relatively easy to determine the
interface addresses on either side of some of their edge routers, and make
a little net map.

Interestingly, when Verizon says they give you five IPs, they give you five
IPs.  It's evidently not a traditional subnetting situation; the upstream
router [or the ONT itself] apparently has individual host routes for
everything within a class C.  So when I expected to see the other three
addresses in what I thought was my /29 show up, I was surprised when they
didn't.  Getting any real info from the Fiber Support Center about how this
is done is like pulling teeth, though.  They appear to have clued in about
many things over the years, but they still insist on not allowing any of
the real techs talk to customers even if nobody else can answer a question.



Back outside, the install tech had sort of pulled everything apart
including the box terminating the copper lines; he wanted to rerun the
drop wires a little more neatly and bundle them together.



The fiber got sort of a drip loop and a blob of putty, as well as a healthy
shot of my expandy-foam insulation stuff from the inside, and everything
got put back together nicely.  The tech mostly works on residential dynamic
installs and was somewhat surprised that he didn't have to do any extra
setup steps.  At this point he was done, so he got to take a nice long lunch.


_H* 060321